Bush’s ‘world order’ needs resurrecting

Editor’s note: This editorial was published in the Express-News’ sister paper, the Houston Chronicle, and is one in which the Express-News Editorial Board is in full consensus.

For a generation of Americans who knew George H.W. Bush as a nasal-voiced “Saturday Night Live” character who spouted “wouldn’t be prudent” as a catchphrase, the steely resolve he demonstrated in the face of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait may seem out of character.

“If it starts dragging down and there’s high casualties, I will be history,” he told his diary. “No problem — sometimes in life you got to do what you got to do.”

That’s because Bush believed it had fallen to him to defend a vision of a postwar international system — one that Saddam brazenly violated. It is a vision that Bush was willing to risk everything to defend, and one still worth pursuing today.

He called it a “new world order.”

The dream, in which world peace would be guaranteed by a cooperative international structure, where small states would not be at the mercy of their neighbors’ territorial ambitions, was an old one.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had hoped the creation of the United Nations Security Council would allow countries to act in concert to secure the peace. He and others saw a future where nations were fully integrated into global institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and United Nations — with the United States firmly at the center. For Bush, it was one where free markets and free people were universally shared values.

Those aspirations were put on hold for decades as World War II quickly gave way to a long, twilight struggle between the United States and Soviet Union. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet empire, the dream once again seemed possible.

“The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation,” Bush said in a 1991 speech to Congress. “Out of these troubled times … a new world order can emerge. A new era — freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace.”

That notion of world peace may sound utopian to modern ears, but at the time it seemed within grasp. Humanity had just witnessed the end of an empire without a major war, thanks in no small part to Bush’s leadership. The world seemed new, and opportunity was limited only by our ambition.

“A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor,” Bush said. “Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. … A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”

That world never came to be.

Yes, there were some quick and important victories. Bush assembled a global force, including Muslims and non-Muslims, to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. He worked closely with allies to reunite Germany and helped from a distance to support the former Soviet Union’s bumpy (and incomplete) path toward democracy. He embraced and enforced the international agreement known as the Montreal Protocol that would heal the hole in the ozone layer, and he negotiated NAFTA to better integrate North America.

Bush accomplished these things in a single term, and after he was replaced as president, progress on developing a cooperative world buoyed by American leadership has wavered. Unnecessary wars, a global recession and an on-again-off-again commitment to the United Nations and other key institutions has left us without the guiding vision Bush pursued.

Now, with Donald Trump at the helm, our nation is in full retreat from any sense of shared responsibility. Alliances are undermined, international treaties abhorred, and bad actors from Vladimir Putin to Mohammed bin Salman operate with impunity. Authoritarianism is on the march in Europe and Asia, and the walls of the world are going back up.

For a millennial generation coming into adulthood, it can be hard to imagine an alternative. The powerful step on the weak, and international conflict feels like the norm. The law of the jungle rules.

Yet in Bush’s life and career we can still see a dream of a better world. It may be his greatest legacy, and we have to ensure that America doesn’t lose the vision of a new world order. We need to remember that peace is possible.

“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on,” President John F. Kennedy once said.